ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997 TAG: 9704040017
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SERIES: Breaking the Color Barrier: the Jackie Robinson Legacy
First in a series
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON THE ROANOKE TIMES
Spring 1959.
There he was at spring training for the Kansas City Monarchs. Not just any baseball club: The team that billed itself as The World Champion Kansas City Monarchs. The Negro League team that had launched Jackie Robinson on his way to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the first breakthrough against the big league color line.
Larry LeGrande, 19 years old and already an All Star, was minding his own business, escaping the Alabama sun by relaxing in his room at Birmingham's Alexander Hotel.
LeGrande and his roommate hear someone coming up the hall rapping on doors. There's a knock on their door. Police.
Two Birmingham policemen - Police Commissioner Bull Connor's men - push their way in. Their German shepherd strains at its leash, growling through bared teeth.
"Explain why you're here," the officers demand.
They search the room.
The two black men are terrified. They show their Monarchs uniforms hanging on nails, explaining they're ballplayers in town for spring training.
The policemen leave without apology.
November 1959.
Larry LeGrande gets a call at his parents' hillside farm on the edge of Roanoke.
Does he have any problem with flying?
Two days later he steps off an Eastern Airlines flight in Tampa. There's a chauffeured car waiting.
He's riding on the 13-mile-long bridge over Tampa Bay to St. Petersburg, and he's thinking: I'm a Yankee now.
A New York Yankee.
He's starting at the bottom in minor-league ball. But this is the Yankees organization, the pin-striped Bronx Bombers of Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford and even a lone black star, a former Kansas City Monarch named Elston Howard.
LeGrande's survived the dog-eat-dog Negro Leagues - the 500-mile bus rides, the bigoted hotel clerks, the bologna sandwiches that passed as pregame meals for top-flight athletes.
Now he's in a different world.
"Oh man, it was heaven. I'd never played Little League baseball. That was for whites. I never played high school baseball. My school didn't have a team to offer. And here I was with the Yankees organization."
Then the come-down: After they cross the bridge into St. Petersburg, the driver drops him off at a seedy hotel on the "colored" side of town. His white teammates stay in a comfortable motel across town.
Some teammates give him the cold shoulder. They don't talk to him unless they absolutely have to. That word - "nigger" - floats down from the grandstands.
But Larry LeGrande has a dream. In the spring of 1960 he's assigned to the St. Petersburg Saints. The first month of the season he leads the team in runs batted in. He leads the Florida State League in triples. The local sports editor calls him the team's best outfielder.
Then his manager calls him in. Word has come down from the Yankees' farm-system brass:
Release Larry LeGrande.
The Yankees don't want to pay the second $2,500 they owe the Monarchs for buying out LeGrande's contract.
His shot at the big leagues is over.
Looking back years later, he thinks he knows why: He was black. More than a decade after Jackie Robinson had nudged the door open, baseball historians say, many major league teams still had a quota system that held blacks to a higher standard.
"I'll tell you, racism was really something at this time," recalls LeGrande, now 57. "I was about two or three years too soon. You know that? Too soon."
Coming up
Larry LeGrande emerges from the back of his Northwest Roanoke home. He holds an oversized photo album in his hands.
"Let me tell you about these pictures," he says. "I cut out these pictures when I was little. That was my favorite thing when I was a little boy."
Pasted in the book are clippings from Ebony, the Pittsburgh Courier and other leading black publications: Jackie Robinson at home with his family. Robinson celebrating with his teammates after hitting a pennant-tying home run. Robinson posing with fellow black trailblazers Roy Campanella, Larry Doby, Don Newcombe. LeGrande wrote in pen across their chests: "Campy," "Doby," "Don," "Robbie."
"I first heard about Jackie Robinson when I was 8 years old," LeGrande recalls. "I couldn't read too well, but I do remember that I read in the Pittsburgh Courier where he'd played with the Kansas City Monarchs."
It was 1947, and Jackie Robinson was fighting to erase baseball's color line. It was a defining moment in American history, a key showdown in the crusade to sweep away racial segregation.
Robinson's legacy is being recalled this spring on the 50th anniversary of his major-league debut. Larry LeGrande and others say it's no disrespect to Robinson to also remember that there were many others in the Negro Leagues who blazed a trail before him - and many who came after him who fought to finish the journey.
It would take 12 years before all major league teams had at least one black player, and 28 more until the majors had their first black manager.
Some ballplayers, like Larry LeGrande, never made it to the big time, and left the game feeling they'd been done in by racism.
One summer, Larry's father took him on the train to Cincinnati to see the Dodgers play. When the public address man announced Robinson's name, thousands cheered.
"Jackie pulled off his cap and waved it around. I'll never forget that. I was 12 years old."
Larry started playing organized ball a couple years later. He joined a Roanoke Valley black sandlot team, the Webster's All Stars, sponsored by a brick-making company. Many of his teammates were grown men 10 or 15 years older.
One spring day in 1957, the Memphis Red Sox, a Negro American League team, and their shrewd, tough-fisted manager, Homer "Goose" Curry, came to Salem to play an exhibition game at Municipal Field.
"They were parked in the street in Salem," LeGrande recalls. "And this black man walked past. His name was Butters Lewis. Goose Curry asked him if he knew of any black baseball players. And he told him he knew of one - and his name was Larry LeGrande."
The Negro Leagues
LeGrande, 17, a senior at Carver High School in Salem, was allowed to take three weeks off to take the train to Memphis for a tryout as a catcher and outfielder.
He made the team, came home and finished school, then headed for Memphis. He'd never played before more than 200 people. In his first game, in Birmingham, 10,000 jammed the ballpark.
The Negro Leagues had once been the only game in town for black ballplayers. After Robinson's breakthrough, they became a conduit of talent into the white leagues. Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and many others went from the black leagues to big-league glory.
By the late 1950s, hard times had come. Many fans were flocking instead to major league ballparks. But scouts continued to prowl the black leagues for prospects.
After a year in Memphis,
LeGrande jumped over to the Detroit Stars, and grew into one of the league's best players. One newspaper compared him to Willie Mays. He was picked for the 1958 East-West All Star Game at Chicago's Cominsky Park.
Jackie Robinson threw out the first pitch. "I shook his hand in the dugout," LeGrande recalls. "He told me: `We will win eventually.' He was talking about integration."
The next summer LeGrande got a chance to play with the most famous team in black ball: The Kansas City Monarchs.
This was the team of Robinson and Satchel Paige, the lanky, ageless drawing card who finally got his chance to pitch in the majors in 1948 - two days after his 42nd birthday.
By 1959, Paige had retired from the majors, but not from baseball, and was pitching again for the Monarchs.
One sweaty Indiana afternoon, LeGrande was Satchel Paige's catcher against a white semi-pro team in Evansville.
"The hotter it got, the better he pitched. He liked hot weather. Because he could loosen up."
He was only going to pitch three innings, his usual. After all, he was in his 50s.
When the third inning was over, LeGrande asked whether Paige was done. Paige said: "One more."
After the fourth: "One more."
After the fifth: "One more."
And so it went, until he had pitched a nine-inning game. And won 4-3.
"Then," LeGrande recalls, "he showed that famous smile on his face."
The Yankees
Near the end of the 1959 season, LeGrande's manager called him over during batting practice. Two big-league scouts, diamond rings on their fingers, wanted to talk. There in the plush offices overlooking the field at Washington's Griffith Stadium - "carpet so thick it threw you off balance" - LeGrande inked his name on a Yankees' contract.
When he started the winter instructional league in Florida, he went from playing on an all-black team to a nearly all-white one. But he recalls two fellow prospects - future major leaguers Joe Pepitone and Clete Boyer - "were friendly right off, and showed no racism toward my skin."
It still wasn't easy. LeGrande sat in a station wagon when his teammates went inside a diner to eat. A waitress brought his food outside.
That spring, he was slated to report to the Carolina League's Greensboro Yankees. But black students' lunch-counter sit-ins had drawn national attention to Greensboro. LeGrande says a Yankee official told him things were too tense there, and he was being sent to the St. Petersburg Saints instead.
LeGrande started hot. He batted in 12 runs and scored 11 more in his first 57 at bats. But he missed several games due to illness and injury and went hitless three days in a row.
When the deadline came for paying off his Monarchs contract, the Yankees balked.
A St. Petersburg paper wrote that it was "with some embarrassment" that the Saints obeyed the Yankee order to release
LeGrande. "The youngster had Negro League experience, speed, arm and power. Fans found the transaction hard to understand."
His manager, Stan Charnofsky, who is now a psychologist in California, doesn't recall thinking racism was behind the Yankees' decision. He says teams often let prospects go after just 30 days to avoid paying them their full signing bonuses.
He remembers LeGrande as a good player, but "I didn't think in those days: He's black so they're not moving him up. I think they would have been happy to have a good black player. Whether they were holding out for the best one, maybe another Elston Howard, I don't know."
Still, this was the Yankees organization, which had one of baseball's worst integration records. It didn't bring a black player up to its big-league club until Howard was elevated in 1955. Casey Stengel, the team's manager into the 1960s, routinely referred to blacks as "niggers" and "jungle bunnies." "When I finally get a nigger," Stengel lamented soon after Howard came up, "I get the only one that can't run."
LeGrande went back to the Monarchs for the rest of the season, figuring some other big-league team would snap him up. Scouts talked, but nobody bought.
His release by the Yankees, he believes, had planted the seed of doubt.
"Three or four teams wanted to sign me. But they were afraid. `Why did you get released? Did you get hurt? Did you do something?' They shied away from me. Really the Yankees had messed me up."
Barnstorming
Dear Larry,
Sign your contract and send it back. We pay 150 wk up. If you hustle real good you will be paid much more.
Your Buddy,
Satchel
Larry LeGrande left the Monarchs in 1961 to play for Satchel Paige's All Stars, the latest in a long line of Paige's great traveling shows. Paige still pitched three innings a night, every night.
The Negro Leagues were dead. The surviving black teams were barnstormers taking on all comers. It was a tough business. But Paige could still pack them in. In towns of 10,000 people, they might draw 20,000 fans.
They swept across the heartland: Lincoln, Nebraska, one day. Worland, Wyoming, the next. Two days in Kansas City. Then Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Winnipeg, Manitoba. Medicine Hat, Alberta. Day after day.
The summers of '61 and '62 were a time of rising black hopes - and growing racial tensions. Paige was a consummate showman. But this was not a happy-go-lucky cross-country tour.
"White people was mad," LeGrande recalls. "I saw so many things racial happen to us. At that time Martin Luther King and Kennedy were seeing to it that blacks would get a chance. And I don't know how many restaurants that we would walk in as a team that white people would get up and walk out. The waitress would just stay behind the counter staring at us."
In Ohio, a hotel's daylight manager checked them in. That night, LeGrande was sitting in the lobby in a high-backed chair, writing a card to his mom in Roanoke.
He heard the night manager - who didn't know LeGrande was there - talking on the the phone.
"We've got a ballclub staying here."
Pause.
"Satchel Paige All Stars."
Pause.
"Them damn niggers have got to go. They can't stay here."
The team packed up and hit the road.
One night on the way to a game in Louisville, the bus driver got pulled over because he didn't have the right state tag. The police made the bus follow them to an impoundment lot. The whole team was locked up along with the bus behind a 6-foot tall chain-link fence.
"They kept us until 7:30. There were 20,000 people waiting for us. And nobody knew where we were."
They dressed inside the bus as it sped to the ballpark.
"We all knew what Jackie Robinson had to go through. I saw `The Jackie Robinson Story.' We all saw it. They showed it to my class at school. That's how we managed to deal with that."
Calling it quits
Larry LeGrande stands ankle-deep in scrub-weeds and brambles. The wind is blowing hard.
He points to a patch of ground covered in dandelions.
"That's where first base was," he says.
He was the youngest of nine children. One day his brothers got permission from their neighbors, the Gravelys, to use their field for a ball diamond. The three brothers got a sickle and cut back the overgrowth. They used broom sticks for bats, rocks for bases.
"We took a tennis ball and threw it as a hard as a baseball," Larry LeGrande says. "That's how I learned to hit the curve ball. When it was my turn, I could really hit the ball."
LeGrande quit baseball after his second season barnstorming with Satchel Paige.
Paige, who died in 1982, made one more trip back to the major leagues.
On Sept. 25, 1965, he pitched three scoreless innings for the Kansas City Athletics. He was 59 years old. Jackie Robinson retired from baseball in 1956. After a long battle against diabetes, he died in 1972 at age 53.
LeGrande took a job in 1964 at General Electric in Salem, sweeping floors. He retired from GE last year as a wireman.
It was hard to give up baseball.
"Awfully hard. I love baseball today still. Someday I hope to get a scouting job. If God is willing. Right now, if I was in baseball, I could help some team win."
If he was coming along now ... But that's gone, he says. Gone for good. He had a good time. He saw the whole country, played the game he loved, crossed paths with Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige and other childhood heroes.
He remembers a weekend with the Monarchs, just before his ill-fated signing with the Yankees.
"We played a game in Kentucky in a cow pasture outside of Louisville. I can't remember the name of the town. We had 19,000 people on a Saturday. On that Sunday, we played in Yankee Stadium."
He laughs.
"From a cow pasture in Kentucky one day to Yankee Stadium the next."
LENGTH: Long : 303 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/THE ROANOKE TIMES. 1. Larry LeGrande posesby CNBwith his Satchel Paige All Stars jersey in the field where he
learned to play baseball as a youngster. The field is near Hunting
Hills Plaza in Roanoke. 2. In 1960, LeGrande (below today) had his
shot with a New York Yankees farm team in Florida. 3. A St.
Petersburg newspaper said he may have been the team's best hitter.
So it was a surprise to fans when the Yankees sent down an order to
release him. color. 4. Snapshot of LeGrande as a teen-age Negro
Leagues catcher. 5. AP. Baseball legend Satchel Paige (right)
recruited LeGrande for his barnstorming baseball team, the All
Stars, in 1961, and LeGrande toured with the team for two years. KEYWORDS: PROFILE